


He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother

by Amerou



Series: The Cahill Project [2]
Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Brother-Sister Relationships, Character Study, Family, Gen, Gore, Growing up ain't easy when you're hunting witches, POV Female Character, Past Abuse, Pre-Canon, Violence, sidelong references to other fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-17
Packaged: 2017-11-23 10:25:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amerou/pseuds/Amerou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Gretel is seven and one half, and has complete and utter faith in her brother, the kind of faith that burns so brightly in her soul that she is completely surprised to hear her brother mumble, voice tinged with the cutting edge of despair, "I don't know what to do."</i>
</p><p>Five times Gretel carries her brother, and one time Hansel carries her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Black Forest

**1.** \- _Black Forest_

Later in life, they would shake their heads at what fools they had been in their youth. 

Even then, Gretel knows better than to bolt into unfamiliar woods in the dark, but what else are they to do? _Stay_ in that house made of candy, the acrid stench of cooked flesh, flesh from children _just like them,_ rising rancid beneath the sweet smell of peppermint and gingerbread? 

The mere thought makes Gretel's gorge rise, and she tugs her brother to a stop, their bare feet skidding in the leaf-litter. They collapse side by side in the shadow of an ancient pine, the needles tickling at their bare skin; puffs of steam rise from their lips as they pant in the frozen air. It's far too cold to be abroad without a coat this time of year, but there are more dangerous things in the Black Forest at night than the chill. 

Hansel doesn't need to hear her thoughts to know what she is thinking, and between gulping down enormous lungfuls of air, he huffs quietly, "We can't go back." 

"There where _can_ we go?" she pants back, her little hand tightening in his. Desperation leaks into her voice, into her face, but Hansel does not allow himself to be affected by it; he is her rock, her steadiness, the very earth beneath her feet, and always has been. It would take more than his little sister's bone-deep fear to move him to a display of weakness. 

The wretched red marks clawing up his thigh and knee from where the witch nearly dragged him into the oven with her are proof enough that neither of them can afford such a thing. 

(Hansel carries the wounds like they do not matter to him, his shoulders set and his jawline grim, but Gretel can see the tremble in his limbs, how _tired_ he is of being strong. He might be older than she is, but he's still only nine. Grown men have broken from less than what Hansel has borne unflinchingly.)

"Not Freiburg." He shakes his head, sets his face in his hands, hair laying lank and dark against his scalp, matted with the witch's drying blood. "We can't go back home, Gretel, we _can't._ There's nothing left for us there." Gretel is silent for long moments, shivering in the cold, waiting for an answer to her question; Gretel's seven and one half, and has complete and utter faith in her brother, the kind of faith that burns so brightly in her soul that she is completely surprised to hear her brother mumble, voice tinged with the cutting edge of despair, "I don't know what to do." 

Gretel moves over in the dirt and leaves, sitting hip to hip with her brother, and loops her arms around his shoulders, sets her chin on his dirty-blonde hair. He puts one of his hands over her forearm, head down, face hidden, but Hansel _needs_ the rest, needs a moment to get his thoughts in order. They sit like that for an eternity of still, silent minutes, the Black Forest seemingly empty of but the mournful howl of the wind and the shuffle and shift of needles and leaves; the longer they wait there, however, the more the forest grows accustomed to their presence. Birds return to the upper reaches of the trees, squirrels scamper across the forest floor, and once, a fox barks in the distance. 

"We could go to Denzlingen," offers Gretel, the words whispered for her brother's ear alone. "They don't know us there. We'd be safe." 

"It's miles and miles away, and we don't even know where we _are_ ," Hansel argues back, hissed low and urgent, pulling sharply back from their embrace to look her in the eye. His own gaze is wild and smudged a deep purple in the hollows, the blue of his irises lost beneath the black whorls of his pupils, impossibly large in the dark. 

(Both of them try not to think about what they're going to do if they reach Denzlingen in the first place. It will be a miracle of the first order if they make the journey at all, much less in one piece.)

"It's north of Freiburg, isn't it? Father said it was. So we just.... find north and keep going until we find Denzlingen." As plans go, it isn't much to go on, even less to stake their lives to - there's countless problems with it, not the least of which is the dangerous territory and the bitter cold. But Hansel's lips are a thin white line in the dark, and Gretel knows without having to ask that he doesn't have anything better to offer; she heaves herself to her feet, and reaches down and pulls Hansel up by the seams of his vest. His bloodied knee buckles when he attempts to put his weight on it, and Hansel makes a strangled little noise in his throat halfway between frustration and screeching agony, but he doesn't dare give voice to it, not with pale shadows beginning to circle them in the night. 

Gretel pulls his arm over her shoulders, shores him up, and they pool what little strength they have between the two of them, bracing for the walk to Denzlingen. 

His weight, leaned hard across her narrow frame, is warm, but not heavy. Never heavy.


	2. Berlin

**2.** \- _Berlin_

Really, Gretel ought to have seen this one coming.

It's been seven years since that night in the Black Forest, where they killed a witch and knew that they were lost. Hansel's put on a bit of height since then, though at (barely) sixteen he's yet to hit his growth, and his voice has at last ceased to crack. Gretel is aware that the pair of them turn heads wherever they go, but she blames the bulk of it on her brother's broadening shoulders, the keenness of his eyes, the teenaged arrogance in his swagger, how he walks like a gunfighter enroute to a duel; the shotgun he carries on his shoulder probably has something to do with it as well, but that does not explain why the barmaids accost him whenever they stop at a tavern, or how the shopkeepers' wives bat their eyelashes and tighten their corset-laces when he crosses into the walls of the towns. 

Gretel hates them all, but as their attentions generally do not divert Hansel from the hunt, she allows them to continue, despite all the very real mischief a fourteen year-old sister can get up to, when comes to preventing her brother from romantic pursuits. 

Then comes Berlin, and Ilse, she of the scarlet hair and the winning smile. Hansel is smitten almost immediately.

It ends about as well as Gretel expects it to. 

(Later in life, Hansel will claim to never before have been in love - but he will also, very carefully, never claim not to have had his heart broken.)

The battle is a protracted one. Much of the outskirts of the city lies in ruins before all things become still; bullet holes and bolts from her crossbow riddle the remaining buildings of the rough-paved square, at least two of which have been reduced to little more than rubble, while an overturned haycart sits crackling where the fire of an explosion has caught it, and what few Berliners have dared to emerge from their homes are beating at the flames with blankets, cursing Ilse's name and praying aloud that the fire does not catch the thatch roofs. Much of the city would go up in a puff of smoke if it did, a catastrophe unworth what little gain Gretel and her brother have earned today, but she cannot quite bring herself to care. She strides right past them, without so much as a moment's pause or concern.

Hansel sits alone on the cobbles in the middle of the carnage, his face streaked with blood and soot, his back pressed to what remains of the well in the center of the square. His shotgun sits in his lap, and his legs are sprawled straight out ahead of him, his blue eyes dull, vacant, distant; if Gretel couldn't see the rise and fall of his chest, and assured for herself before that her brother was uninjured in the course of the fight, she would have thought him a casualty himself, shot and slumped against the stone. She approaches from the side, stepping slowly and carefully across the scattered debris, well within his line of sight, should he choose to acknowledge her presence. He does not move except to breathe, does not even blink, even when Gretel kneels at his side and allows her hand to come to rest on his shoulder.

His eyes don't even flicker sideways at the touch, but his hands ease away from the trigger of his shotgun, just a little. 

Before him on the ground lies sprawled the mangled corpse of what was once a witch; her face and form have been twisted out of true, her features all but unrecognizable beneath the spines that emerge from her porcelain skin, overlapping like chitinous scales, and her hands are unnaturally long and thin, her fingers ending in obscene sickle-talons fit to rend a man limb from limb. Holes from bullets and bolts alike are sprinkled across her shape like horrific freckles, the largest a fist-sized gap in her chest where a solid silver slug had ripped through her like a knife through tissue-paper - but the black pool of blood she lays in, the tears and fissures and unnatural angles of her limbs, are not nearly so disturbing as the crimson void where the back of her head had once been, her savage-featured face still contorted in the rage and agony she had felt just before she fell.

Scarlet hair fans around the remnants of her head like a bloodied halo, and Hansel stares at her, too heart-weary even for hatred. 

(It isn't the last time a witch uses beauty to ensnare Gretel's brother, but as the saying goes, it is the first cut that strikes the deepest.)

"Up you go, brother," says Gretel, tugging at his sleeve; he's much bigger than she is now, and putting on muscle and height with every passing day, so she is no longer strong enough to yank him to his feet as when they were children. Hansel goes as she bids him, though, rising to his feet like a man waking slowly from a dream, stepping away from the twisted pile of limbs and meat that used to wear a lovely smile. Gretel abandons him only long enough to pad for the burning haycart, there to take a smoldering spar from one of the wheels and bear the banked flame back over to where Hansel stands. 

He doesn't ask, and she says nothing in return; in this, no words are necessary for the pair of them to communicate. He takes the burning wood from her hand and throws it onto Ilse's corpse, and they stand there and watch her burn.

The stench of cooking flesh takes Gretel back to that candy-house in the woods, but she does not move to leave, only stands there with her brother, shoulder to shoulder; when Hansel turns away from the blackening shape of what used to be a woman, though, and mumbles something about going and getting their pay before the Burgermeister makes off with it, Gretel only too happily leads him away from Ilse's cinders. 

He stumbles those first few steps across the cobbles, scrubbing clumsily at his eyes, and Gretel steadies him with patient hands, more than willing to pretend that Hansel's eyes are stinging from the smoke.


	3. Belgium

**3.** \- _Belgium_

They're ambushed in the marketplace, _in broad fucking daylight,_ and Gretel can't remember ever being so mad at a witch. 

Well, perhaps broad daylight isn't the most accurate term - it's pouring down buckets over Diksmuide right now, a storm of perhaps supernatural origins having moved in off the river, and the street is slick with water, making her footing uncertain; the rain stings against their faces, which makes it hard enough to sight the witch up in the swirling air, though the screaming, scattering citizens of the township certainly don't make it any easier. This witch in particular is a clever one, sidestepping or disarming all of their traps out in the wilds, waiting for the cover of the storm with which to meet the hunters on _her_ terms - the first that Gretel knows of her presence, beyond the depredations of the area's children, is when she swoops out of the sky and tries to rake her talons across Gretel's face. 

The townsfolk flee in clumps, like startled pigeons, with no regard for order or sensibility; Hansel, squinting up into the rain, leads the witch's movements and fires off a shot, before Gretel kicks in the front display of a market booth and hauls her brother up underneath the overhang. Hansel clips the witch more out of pure luck than skill - sometimes it is better to be lucky than good - but though black blood now spatters down to etch the street in oily, arcane patterns, the witch does not flee, only howls in rage and circles, tearing holes in roofs and raining the shingles down upon the square. Both Gretel and her brother sight and shoot, time and again, but cannot land any decisive blows, stranded under the overhang and half-blind even with the cover provided - and yet the witch does not abandon the field, instead circling the marketplace as if looking for something, screeching in unholy furor that she is denied her pursuit. 

"Why isn't she running?" growls Hansel under his breath, continuing to lead the witch with the sights of his shotgun, but unwilling to waste any more ammunition on fouled shots. Gretel shakes her head, casts her eyes about the marketplace.

"There must be something here she wants -" 

Gretel spots the girls first - two blond-plaited children clinging to each other underneath a merchant-cart, soaked to the skin and terrified, hiding from the witch - but it is Hansel that mutters a vile curse and sprints out into the rain, when the witch swoops low and the children bolt, like rabbits flushed from the safety of their dens. 

Hansel gets there before the witch does, and stretched full-length he dives to bear them to the ground, the witch catching only a handful of yellow hair on the very tips of her outstretched talons; she overshoots the hunter and her quarry, but turns back on herself like a snake as Hansel rolls over, off the children, and comes up with the shotgun. They meet head-on, and there's a shot and screams (both little girls and the echoing snarl of the witch, laced with strange and resonant harmonics) and then Gretel is firing bolt after bolt into the witch's back, calm and present in the moment, refusing to contemplate the spurt of scarlet beginning to eddy in the water pooling on the Diksmuide streets. 

The witch twists away from Hansel, listing to one side in the air, and Gretel follows the track of her flight with grim precision, firing bolt after bolt from her repeater into the witch's side as she wheels around for another pass. This time she's flying straight at Gretel, and when the crossbow clicks on empty Gretel hauls up the long silver-edged knife from where it is tucked in her belt, and the witch slams into her with all the force of a landslide, causing the crossbow to go flying from Gretel's hand. They tumble together end over end through the wet, but though the witch ends up on top, Gretel roars and slashes at the monstrous creature's pale neck, over and over, hot black blood scouring across her face, her hands, soaking into her clothes. The witch stops scrabbling for Gretel's neck and tries to press her palms to her own, but Gretel feels the knife catch on bone and _twists_ with all her might, and there's a sickening slurping-popping noise before the witch goes limp and still, her rheumy eyes staring blankly through Gretel's own. 

Gretel shoves the witch off of her, but makes sure to saw her head off the rest of the way before she abandons the corpse, trudging over towards Hansel's prone form. She and her brother did not survive a decade of killing witches by making dumb mistakes. 

The little blond girls have fled by now, and Gretel can hear their retreating footsteps distantly over the pelt and hiss of the rain; little ingrates, both of them, and Gretel curses them as she staggers through the storm to Hansel, falling to her knees beside him. The witch has raked her across her sides, and the wounds _hurt_ and make it difficult to walk, impossible to walk a straight line - but Gretel has greater concerns, for she can see the white gleam of bone peeking through the ragged red slashes where the witch has sliced her brother open, his lips pale and his eyes fixed on the steel-grey sky. She thinks for a moment that he's already dead, that she spent too much time playing in-close with the damn witch to save her own blood, before he groans deep and his eyes track to rivet themselves upon her face. Rainwater's already starting to pool in his wounds, and Gretel does not want to think _at all_ about what that might mean for her brother's chances. 

"You," she mutters as she sheds her leather jacket and uses it to cover him over, pressing the lining in against his wounds, "are a complete _idiot._ "

"I love you too, sis," mumbles Hansel, though he hisses in pain when she pulls him sitting upright, so that she can get her shoulder up under his. Between the two of them, they manage to get him upright, though Hansel's knees are refusing to cooperate, and at the end of it he's more draped across his sister than actually standing. 

"Kids lived, at least," he adds under his breath, as they start to move away from the market and back into the city proper, the rain already washing away all traces of his blood, though the blackness of the witch's ichor stays, heavy and greasy on the cobbles. 

"Yeah. Kids lived," sighs Gretel, hefting Hansel's weight a bit further up and already beginning to wonder where she can find a chirurgeon in Diksmuide to sew her brother's insides back in. "Just this one time, Hansel - everybody lives."


	4. Britain

**4.** \- _Britain_

The Governor's man finds them in Diksmuide, just as Hansel has healed enough to consider moving on. 

The Belgians have sheltered them well these past weeks - fervent thanks for a job well done, or a ward against the predations of another witch, Gretel can't quite decide - but the Governor's man comes bearing gold pieces and many of them, his weary eyes grim and grey, the salt and pepper of his beard belying the quickness of his gaze; he's there to offer them a job, but he sees the stiffness with which Hansel holds himself, the way Gretel interposes between the stranger and her brother, so recently come away from his brush with Death. 

Gretel is about to send the Governor's man away, with a bolt in his ass if at all possible, when he says (in thickly accented and poorly-constructed German, which makes Hansel snort derisively) that there is a witch in London, and three children have gone missing in as many weeks.

The gold is good, heavy British pieces from across the Channel, but Gretel insists on half of their pay up front. Hansel spends the journey sitting in the prow of the ship, wrapped shoulder to hip in bandages as the last of the red claw marks on his belly heal and fade.

He stares out across the grey and restless sea, and says hardly a word to anyone for the length of the journey.

(Later - much later - Hansel will confess to his sister than he wishes sometimes that he _had_ died on those wet cobblestones in the Belgian rain, and Gretel will have no words for him, only holds his callused hand in her own, the silent comfort of her presence the best thing she can offer.

Hansel doesn't need to know that sometimes, she wishes she had died there herself.) 

Witches are thick on the ground on the mainland, but across the water to the Isles they are considerably rarer; this one, as Gretel and her brother discover when they scout the nest, is very much the aberrant from the normal pattern but in the best possible way, young and hot-blooded, yet to cultivate the wickedness and cunning of her forebears - she's only a few months entrenched in her lair, but glutting openly on the flesh of the young. Barely a fledgling, really, especially compared to the eldritch monstrosities that Hansel and Gretel meet in the course of their everyday lives, and they have her rooted out from her hovel in only a matter of days, her body ashes on the pyre in a fraction of their usual time. 

It would feel like more of an accomplishment if they had ever found the children, and they're somber and still in the pub afterward, sitting at table with the Governor's man while the townsfolk celebrate loudly all around them. 

The Governor's man stares at them the whole while, a hilarious mixture of awe and respect upon his aged face, and eventually Gretel asks him over her mug, "That vas simple enough. Why couldn't hyu send hyur own hunters?" (Her English is better than Hansel's, more practiced and better pronounced; Gretel half-thinks he stays quiet as much out of a prideful unwillingness to be seen as ungainly as it is a lack of understanding.)

They find then, to the siblings' great interest, that the grizzled Governor's man is in fact a hunter himself - but Britannia is almost never plagued with witches, and so his expertise lies in other areas. Hansel especially has had his curiosity piqued, and he gestures to the barmaids for more of what passes for alcohol on this side of the Channel as he begins to ask pointed, perhaps impertinent questions of the Governor's man. What begins as a simple test of experience on both sides of the continental divide instead becomes the sharing of a vast well of knowledge that runs deeper and wider than Gretel ever dreamed. Witches are their forte, but the Governor's man has fought dragons, pookah, banshees, fairies, changelings, all manner of strange things that would seem.... well, _outlandish,_ if Gretel hadn't herself shoved a witch into an open oven when she was only a child. 

When the men lose their taste for beer, Hansel calls for the Bärenfang, only to discover (much to his dismay) that such a drink is not stocked across the water, not in stolid British taverns, anyway; what follows is the Governor's man introducing Hansel for the first time to gin and Scotch whisky, while Gretel wisely declines to partake, even a mere two fingers of the liquor enough to make her eyes begin to water. Hansel, she is grateful to see, is losing his reticence the longer he and the Governor's man speak, opening up like a tattered flower to the sun; the tab would be ridiculous before long, if the townspeople had not opened their kegs unto their saviors from the witch, but Gretel smiles against her cup to see her brother well into his, his cheeks red with good cheer, speaking animatedly with blue eyes bright as they have not been in weeks, since well before Diksmuide. 

This, also, ends about as well as Gretel expects it to. Sitting back in her seat as her brother and the old hunter share war-stories back and forth, however, she decides that she cannot interfere, not in this, even as Hansel weaves in and out of German and English seemingly at impulse, the former rapid-fire and sharply-enunciated, the latter slurred and full of vowels in unusual places. The Governor's man seems to have little enough trouble following her brother, though, smiling faintly through his beard and gesturing grandly in places; at one point they commandeer mugs and utensils from surrounding tables and use the implements to recreate the most storied hunts of their lives. A jar of pickles stands in for an ogre in one such tale, to Gretel's great amusement.

It's well past midnight when the three of them at last stumble out of the establishment; Hansel and the Governor's man _reek_ of alcohol, and though Gretel, her shoulder beneath Hansel's, keeps her brother reasonably steady as they vacate the pub, the Governor's man sways alarmingly on his feet, dancing an Augsburg waltz to a tune he can only hear inside his own head. Hansel, not so drunk as to be free of his protective tendencies, reaches out to steady him with a hand on his sleeve, despite the fact that he is only kept vertical by virtue of Gretel's fraying patience. 

"Hyu -" grins Hansel in _extremely_ unsteady English, tugging the Governor's man back into true, "hyu are goot man, Yan of Veenchester. Bot, not moch for der drink, I think."

"It's _John,_ Hansel," the Governor's man laughs back, reaching up in an attempt to thump Hansel on the shoulder; his hand goes wide about six inches high and to the left. "For love of God, man, are all Deutschlanders allergic to the letter J, or just you?"

"That's enough, boys," says Gretel, rolling her eyes even as she suppresses the twitch of her lips that threatens to develop into full-blown laughter. "Go home, _John._ Kiss hyur wife und sons for me, hey?" 

John of Winchester salutes her in the street as crisply as if she were the Queen, the man himself grinning lopsidedly at her, before he staggers off towards his own house and his own bed. Gretel steers her brother in the opposite direction, in search of their lodgings. The further they go from the stoop of the pub, the less Hansel tends to bear his own weight, and Gretel is just wondering how in hell she's going to get her brother's great stupid bulk up the stairs of the inn when Hansel's far half careens face-first into the side of a passing building. The blue-eyed hunter hits the street like a sack of potatoes, fetching up against the foundation of the building as if washed there by the tide, but when he rolls onto his back and throws an arm across his face, he's laughing madly, grin stretched from ear to ear, as if this were the most hilarious occurrence in the world. 

Gretel stares down at him a moment, one dark brow arched, before she kicks him in the leg. "Get up, you ridiculous bastard," she says in stern German, entirely through with his shenanigans. "I can't carry you, you're fatter than that pickle-jar ogre. I've half a mind to just leave you here in the gutter." 

Hansel pushes himself up on his elbows, the sleeves of his coat pulled tight enough around his shoulders to make the seams pucker; Gretel makes a mental note to sew in another gusset, before her moron brother pops the stitches entirely. "You wouldn't leave me. What would you do without me?" he says with entirely too much confidence for a man so drunk, his smile crooked but genuine, the very picture of filial loyalty. 

Gretel grumbles under her breath as she takes his arm and helps him back to his feet, but she would sooner stab herself in the heart than crush that so-rare flicker of happiness on her brother's rugged features. 

They both deserve better than such cruelty.


	5. Bad Kissingen

**5.** \- _Bad Kissingen_

Rumours are, ironically, the lifeblood of Gretel's profession. The minds of the people run rampant with stories, but in this nightmare-plagued age Gretel finds a grain of truth at the center of the tales, more often than not; while they have never met were-creatures or talking frogs or even sleeping princesses, however, when word of mouth travels from one town to the next in its own circuitous way, bearing ghastly details that align a little too closely to the truth for the imaginations of the peasantry, that is when Gretel and her brother pack up their horses and begin scouting for work.

In this case, someone has found a scattered set of finger bones in the bottom of a spring that supposedly possesses healing powers. Nothing strange in and of itself - people drown in springs all the time, even healing ones - but that the bones are too small for anything other than that of a young child _is._

Hansel packs their things without further question, and he and Gretel are on the road within the hour.

The spring and its baths have brought Bad Kissingen fame and prosperity in an otherwise depressed region; its people have grown fat and wealthy, preying on the coin of strangers seeking to cure their ills in the town's waters, and while the adults laugh and cavort in the streets, to all outside appearances jovial and content, Gretel watches the faces of the children and sees nothing but pervasive fear - but not of strangers. The adults retreat suspiciously from the advance of the siblings walking into the town square, but the children one and all abandon their families to crowd around the hunters' ponies, and Hansel in particular. Her brother is usually so forbidding and stoic, but now he is transformed into a gentler man when the little ones tug at his coattails - but they do not beg him for candy or coins, as did the children of other villages past. 

No, they ask of the foreign pair, "Please, take us with you," and Gretel _sees_ it when Hansel's grim visage cracks, when he has that first inkling that something is terribly wrong here. 

(Gretel feels it too, that twisting in her gut that informs her that coming to Bad Kissingen was a mistake, telling her that she almost does not want to know what makes the children of Bad Kissingen cling so trustingly to outsiders, shuddering in terror in the shadows of their parents.)

Turns out there's an _enormous_ coven of witches in this backwater town, that the healing powers of the spring - and the wealth of its people - have been bought with the flesh of the innocent. Bad Kissingen is a wealthy town, a _good_ town, in a region when all others of its ilk are slowly suffocating under their own stale economies....

And all it costs the populace is four children a year, one each on the solstices and equinoxes.

Gretel has never been so disgusted with her own kind before, although many could argue that normal people could hardly be described as kin to the likes of Gretel and her brother. 

Once they find the nest, they don't even bother to scout inside of it it; they set fire to the structure entire instead, to smoke the coven out, and they let the witches boil into the surrounding air like angry wasps, screeching and howling and slinging spellfire left and right. There's nearly a dozen of them, all told - how they managed to survive for so long on one child a season, Gretel does not know and will never attempt to guess - and nine of them they end in the upper reaches of the trees, by bolt and bullet and silvered whip, by fire and iron and salt. The last three rush at the siblings from the ground, neophytes with brooms barely-made and lacking the skill to fly, but still unwilling to die without giving Gretel and her brother a fight. 

Forming the point of their wedge is a vaguely-recognizable Frau Schneider, the Burgermeister's wife, and Gretel tilts her head and her and mutters, "You have _got_ to be shitting me." 

Hansel huffs a quick bark of laughter -"Looks like we're not getting paid for this one, sis" - but it doesn't last long; in moments the witches are on them, and Frau Schneider fights like a woman possessed. Despite the slightness of her frame, it takes all of the hunters' collective skill to keep her contained, and the other pair of witches use the distraction she provides to full benefit, bolting off into the woods in opposite directions, abandoning Frau Schneider to her fate. Gretel nails one between the shoulder blades with a bolt, while Hansel downs the other one with a perfectly-aimed shot to the back of the bitch's head. 

Unfortunately, killing the fleeing witch leaves Hansel just open enough that Frau Schneider gets him full-on with the whirling head of her broom, as hard as she can between his open-stance legs. 

Hansel crumples like a ball of tissue paper to the ground, while Gretel launches herself at Frau Schneider before the witch can take advantage of her fallen brother; they land in the leaf-litter with Gretel on top, and she doesn't bother with shooting her at this distance, just bashes the witch's skull in with the reinforced double heads of her crossbow, all the strength Gretel has going into every blow. She's spattered with black blood by the time Frau Schneider stops twitching, and when Gretel stands up, she puts a bolt through the witch's eye, just for good measure. 

Her attention, though, is for fallen Hansel; for a moment she's worried he's genuinely been hurt, but once she staggers over to him she sees that he's curled on his side and around himself, groaning softly under his breath with his knees drawn up, hands buried between his own thighs. Gretel stands over him, crossbow on her shoulder, and clucks her tongue chidingly. "She get you right in your.... pride?" It's something so ridiculous in the midst of the blood and violence that she can't help the laughter in her voice, the smile spreading across her face. Hansel's blue eyes flash at her from where he lies in the dirt. 

"Har de fucking har, Gretel," growls out Hansel, but he doesn't refuse her outstretched hand when he tries to get back to his feet, listing heavily to one side like a ship with a broken keel. He doesn't hesitate to sling his arm over her shoulder, either, the other hand keeping hold of his shotgun, just in case one of the downed witches gets back up before they have a chance to burn them or hack off their heads. 

"Oh, walk it off, you weakling," laughs Gretel, poking her brother in the ribs, the pair of them together beginning to shuffle off towards the copse of trees where their horses have been secreted, the remainder of their supply of torches and fire starters with them. 

Hansel bares his teeth at her in a halfhearted snarl. "Here, let me kick you in the tit as hard as I can, see how quickly you _walk it off._ " 

"No thanks, brother; _I_ don't stand with my feet as wide apart as I can while there's a witch with a broom at close range." 

Hansel spits a curse as vile and black as any sent at them by a witch's wand, stumbling a bit even with Gretel to hold him upright. "Let's never speak of this again." 

"Are you _kidding?"_ Gretel grins, thumping her brother on the back with an open hand. "I'm going to be telling your _children_ about how they almost never existed, because Frau Schneider nailed you in the shotgun shells with her broom. On a charity hunt, no less!" 

"I wouldn't call it charity," grits out Hansel, his face going stern and dark, "not when I'm going to take every fucking mark out of the Burgermeister's hide." 

Hansel ends up killing the Burgermeister for his part in the deaths of so many children, handing them over to the witches in order that the town would continue to prosper; they never do get properly paid for the Bad Kissingen job, but they don't get run out of town, either, and even if the adults wail and gnash over the future of their village, the shadows lurking in the eyes of the children are banished, and Gretel considers that payment enough.

She buys Hansel a wooden nutcracker in a shop two towns over, and though he levels a glare at her for it that would have put a lesser woman in her grave, he wraps it carefully in his spare shirt and tucks it at the bottom of his pack anyway. 

What are siblings for, after all, if not to help you up when you fall, and then tease you for the rest of your life for it afterward?


	6. Boneyard

**+1.** \- _Boneyard_

"C'mon, Gretel," Hansel hisses, using temper to hide the shock of his fear, slapping at her forearms with one cold hand when her fingers go slack where they are tangled in his coat. "Stay with me. Stay awake. You need to _stay awake,_ Gretel, you hear me? Just until we get to the shack." 

Gretel is slumped against his shoulderblades as he carries her piggyback through the snow like when they were children; every crunching bootstep is like watching him wade through a white sea, towards the swaying shack at the center of the boneyard, so old and decrepit it looks fit to be knocked over by a stiff breeze. It's their best chance at survival right now, though, and so Gretel digs her fingers into Hansel's leather coat and holds on as tight as she can, fighting the growing sense of vertigo that wants her to either fall asleep or puke her guts right out of her narrow frame, and can't seem to decide which. Her skin is so tight it feels like it might split right open, so hot that little wisps of steam are rising from her form and into the cold air. 

Ah, everything went so pear-shaped in such a bleeding hurry. Their traps were laid well, the land scouted thoroughly, their quarry sighted in plenty of time to bring her to ground in the middle of the orchard in which she nested. What neither of them expect is that the witch in question would go so far as to coat the apples of the orchard in poison. 

It's hungry work, hunting witches, and Gretel, like her brother, has never been one to turn down a snack. She knows as soon as she bites into the apple that the taste of it is entirely _wrong,_ but even though she spits the pieces out without swallowing them down, before long she's dizzy and laboring to breathe. Hansel sees her, sees the bits of apple in the snow at her feet, slings her up across his back and abandons the hunt in seconds, making the kind of line-of-fire decision that is usually Gretel's purview, but she can forgive him for infringing on her territory, just this once.

The fever makes it hard to think, harder to pay attention to her surroundings. Hansel might have been walking forever, for all that Gretel knows. 

There is less than an hour before dusk now as Hansel trots through the snow, Gretel bouncing along on his back, clinging to him with what little strength she can muster - but though her brother must be cold solidly through, must be aching in every inch, he doesn't talk of taking the road or bedding down in the orchard; they won't make the town before dark, and the orchard is open ground, unprotected, a killing field in more ways than one. 

All Hallows' Eve is a dangerous time to be in the open, when the sun finally sets. Both of them know it without speaking it, that they can't afford _not_ to be behind closed doors when darkness falls.

But the boneyard - earth full of the dust of the honorable dead, their headstones weathered and worn into obscurity from the centuries - the boneyard is consecrated ground, still holy though it has been long forgotten, the caretaker's shack at its center little more than a single-room ramshackle with a fireplace. In this moment, though, poison burning in her veins and her vision swimming before her eyes, the looming shack looks like salvation, as safe and welcoming as any castle in Germany. If the damned walls hold up through the night and see them safely into the dawn, she will kiss the foundation that they are built on. 

Gretel remembers the impact, Hansel hitting the door to the shack as if he's expecting an entire army to be holding it shut from the other side. She remembers him toeing and kicking their tattered assembly of blankets and furs into a tangled pallet before the sagging fireplace, remembers him gently coaxing her down off of his shoulders and into the soft nest; she remembers his face leaning over her, his haggard features twisted with concern as he tucks her in, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. He fades away in a haze of black, and shocks of cold and heat.

A little later when she opens her eyes again, the hearth is lit and crackling near her head, and Hansel has an earthen jar in hand as he painstakingly draws salt lines across every conceivable place in the little shack where spirits might attempt to enter - a line across the door, on the sills of both tiny windows, and when she twists in the blankets to look behind her, there's a bracket-shaped demarcation around the fireplace, though any witch that might view that as a potential point of entry is probably more than a little suicidal. Hansel hears the movement and comes over to soothe her back down, but before he can reach her she's already falling back into the darkness. 

Howling noises bring her back out of it, and screaming; God's love, there is so much _screaming,_ and it feels like it's reverberating inside her own head, bouncing around like bullets inside her skull. When she pries her eyes open one more time, however, she sees that the shack is empty but for the two of them and their belongings, Hansel sitting next to her with his shotgun in his lap, his eyes flicking back and forth between the windows and the door. 

His right hand, his off-hand, is wound about with bandages, and there are rust-red sigils on all the walls of the shack, the most elaborate up near the ceiling over the frame of the door, just about as far as her brother can feasibly reach. 

Trust her brave-hearted brother to turn the witches' crafts against them. 

The howling, she slowly realizes, is coming from outside of the shack, not within; with every volley of screeches, the walls shake and the ceiling trembles, but the salt lines hold, the sigils are steady, and Hansel is steadiest of all, his thumb caressing the safety on his shotgun, over and over again. 

She moves a little in the nest of furs and blankets, and Hansel glances over at her, stills her with a warm palm on her shoulder. 

(In the years after that first witch, they both have nightmares on a frequent basis, nightmares that never seem to wane in frequency even as they grow into adulthood; once, when they both lie awake in the dark and the rain roared against the bubble-glass windows, they confess to each other what they have been plagued by in the shadows, what fel and foul creations of their minds haunt them through the nighttime hours. 

Unsurprisingly enough, their individual terrors neatly align.

Gretel fears being taken by the witches; Hansel fears being too weak to keep it from happening.)

"I've got you," he whispers somberly as spirits and witches and God knows what all other manner of supernatural creatures rail and pound on the walls, his face as serious as on any hunt. "They won't take you, Gretel, not tonight. Not while I still breathe." 

She frees a hand from where it's tangled in the furs, puts it over her brother's on her shoulder, and lets her eyes fall shut again, comforted. The windows rattle in their panes, and the walls shake and the fire gutters; but Hansel's hand never moves from where she holds it pinned beneath her own, her fingertips pressed into the rough texture of the linen wrapped around his palm.

He sits there watching over her until well past first light, one hand on his shotgun, the other anchoring his sister to the world, and she never hears a word of complaint for it in all the long, hard-fought years they hunt together afterward.

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically canon-compliant with [GalahadsGurl's UALP](http://archiveofourown.org/works/498313/chapters/873638) and my own side-story in that 'verse, [Fairy Tales](http://archiveofourown.org/works/527064/chapters/933138), but this work can be considered a stand-alone short story. As it is written and published before the movie actually comes out, I apologize for inconsistencies with the canon work, though I have retroactively done the best I can to make all the details fit. 
> 
> Some liberties taken with historical details ~~and possibly some geographic ones too~~ but hey, so does the film!


End file.
